Beatriz Preciado

Philosopher and queer activist, Research Associate at the Université Paris VIII

The State Brothel: Sex, Biopolitics and Debt in the Utopian Construction of Europe after Restif de la Bretonne

Not long before the French Revolution, in 1769, the writer Restif de la Bretonne devised a plan to build a network of state brothels in Europe aimed at “clearing the city streets of the danger supposed by solitary, lost and homeless women”. Conceived by Restif as a biopolitical approach to urban hygiene to prevent and treat syphilis in Europe, the state brothel operates within a debt economy: the women workers, accused of spreading syphilis or perverting social morals, enter the brothel with a debt to be paid, which is gradually revealed to be unpayable. Restif’s state brothel as a European utopia appears, today, as a critical model for reflecting on the current construction of Europe around debt, the new forms of capitalist accumulation, the policies of preventive detention and the exploitation of the force of sexual labour.

The effectiveness of the sexist discourse is manifested especially in the continuing validity of the historical wall that stands between “bad women” and “decent women” and which has provoked the social isolation of prostitutes and a lack of solidarity among women. Until just a few years ago, women’s movements had marginalised women prostitutes by not allowing them to add their voices to the struggle for rights, despite being among the principal protagonists. Feminist ideology has cooperated naively in the discrimination against sex workers by seconding a victimising and alienated vision of women prostitutes, persons seen as incapable of acting autonomously and creating their own strategies. The payment to prostitutes for sexual services has been seen by classic feminism as the maximum expression of the subordination of women. As for the whore stigma, it is a very effective tool for controlling the rest of women and perpetuating a lack of solidarity among them. There is no worse insult for a woman than to be accused of being a whore. For this reason, women who seek social acceptance try hard to elude this denigrating label although we often fail in the attempt. Any woman can, at any time, be considered “too independent” and a dangerous opponent of the sexist social organisation that refuses women the right to self-definition and, therefore, to self-sufficiency. The stigma of being called a whore serves to keep women at bay, to punish us if we dare to transgress the social norms assigned to each of the sexes. Therefore, the reflection made by Gayl Pheterson is very appropriate, when she maintains that while there is still one sole woman discriminated against because of her sex life, all women remain vulnerable to discrimination. Against all odds, the world of prostitution is also our world.

(Excerpt from an article by Isabel Holgado Fernández Anthropologist. Member of the Collective Al Hanan-Las Licitas)

Salvador Cayuela

Research Doctor linked to the Jean Monnet Chair at the University of Murcia, where he works with the chair holder, Prof. Klaus Schriewer.

Building the ideal producer. Mechanisms of subjectivation and resistance in Franco’s Spain

The main objectives of any political system are, on the one hand, to bolster the power of the State and, on the other hand, to reduce individuals’ response capacity. In this regard the Franco regime was no exception and therefore, from its beginnings, had to organise a whole set of mechanisms for disciplining, standardising and regulating individuals and populations, which permitted the replication and legitimisation of the system, on the one part, but, conversely, proved unable to minimise the resistance that, ultimately, led to the downfall of the dictatorship.

Alejandra Riera, artist

The question of being sensitive to the essential things that surround us is not especially new. The publication or dissemination of different ideas on a wider scale is not without its risks. We know that our economy is not adequate. Nor was it in 1929 when Kracauer published The Employees in the form of twelve articles in the literary and cultural section of the Frankfurter Zeitung (before publishing them as a book). At that time, Kracauer described the status of the employee as something that had not been “analysed” enough owing to its excessive proximity. “And what about the employees themselves?” he reflected. “They are even less aware than others of the situation they find themselves in. However, anyone can observe how they live. This exposure to the gaze of others is precisely what prevents the discovery of the truth, like in The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe. Nobody finds the letter because it is in full view of everyone. Undoubtedly, considerable forces are in play so that we do not notice anything”.
[Kracauer, Les Employés, 2000, p. 27.]